Sunday, July 7, 2013

Robert K. Thomas: Colonialism: Domestic and Foreign

Colonialism: Domestic and Foreign

Colonialism is one of the structured ways in which people come in contact, or
perhaps better put, one of the ways in which people have a limited contact with
each other. In this chapter I will present to you two models of colonial
situations.
In the last century the colonial arrangement was the major way in which
Europeans came in contact with and set up relationships with other peoples,
particularly folk peoples. It is also the major way that the modern middle class
in large nation-states comes in contact with regional, rural and working class
groups of people. A colonial structure is only one kind of contact., but it is
widespread in the modern world and I would like to submit to you two models of
this kind of contact - one, I call the classic model of colonialism, and the
other I'll call hidden colonialism. I don't know whether "hidden" is
the beat descriptive word. I use this term because this type of colonialism is
not as obvious structurally to the observer as the classic model of colonialism.

The first model, the classic model, could be seen all aver Africa and Asia,
until recently. European powers set up specified legal bureaucracies to
administer to colonial people; so the structure was readily observable. You
could see the, persons of British administrators in an African colony, or as
today in the U.S., the employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs on an American
Indian reservation. This is the classic model. The other model is less
observable, but has to a large degree the same kind of effects. One
"people" specifically administer the affairs of another, but in this
case by institutional relationships that are pulled up out of one economic level
or one "community" and placed in another one. In this model the
administering "community" is part of the general overall society in
which the subordinate community also exists.

Let us say that there is such a social unit. an at "normal"
community with different kinds of institutional structures in it, political and
economic structures, which relate this community to its total environment. In a
classic colonial situation most of these institutions are placed in the hands of
an outside bureaucracy of officials, or indirectly linked to them.. like the
English administrators in West Africa before African freedom. There usually also
evolves some kind of organ which mediates between the colonized people and the
colonial power, If a community is a system of life which comes to grips with the
day-to-day environment,, them a society in such a situation is certainly not a
community, because this group of people (this small society) now does not come
to grips with life as it is lived day to day. This is the classic colonial
situation.

What I call the hidden colonial situation (and I would say that Latin America
is a hidden colony as are many parts of the U.S.) has the same general effect.
We can see this in the relations between the working class and the middle class
in Detroit, for instance. The institutions of the middle class do the job for
the working class, but this is not as obvious a process as in the classic model.
In the hidden model there is great differential power between the administrated
and the administrators., and institutional decisions are made through the
institutions of the administrators.
I am particularly concerned with the ramifications that this kind of model
has on change. And I'll suggest several things to you about change in a colonial
situation. Let me take first the classic model.
To begin with, there is, in the broadest sense, the decay of the subordinate
people's own institutions. That is, whatever institutions were previously
present either 'become inoperative with the forms still remaining, as with
certain tribal political systems in West Africa before independence, or they
decay altogether These decaying or inoperative systems will change function and
be used in one way or another depending on the kind of people affected.

Secondly, as the native institutions decay and are not replaced it becomes
harder for people in such a community to relate to one another in and any
productive manner. If the community has no jobs to do., is making no decisions
about its own destiny, there is no way for one person to make any judgment about
another's worth in terms of what he can contribute to the welfare of the group.
Leadership or prestige which is functionally based is non-existent. This,
interpersonal relations become more problematical and the stability of each
personality becomes more problematical and called Into question.

The third effect of colonialism is to bring about a very high degree of
social isolation. It seals off the community from relationships with other
people in other communities. If even seals off the relationship with the
physical environment. For instance, if the colonial power decides that a road
will be built in a certain part of West Africa, and the subject people are not
in on the decision making process, then in effect, they are isolated from their
own physical environment, as well as being socially isolated from people they
would have ordinarily come in contact with, because all such contact is siphoned
through the colonial organization. Change really doesn't take place under such
conditions, except In the form of internal decay.

Social scientists say that social change Is new Social experience. A
community doesn't change -very much unless its people are experiencing
themselves through their fellows and their environment,- grappling with and
making decisions about new situations. This is how a human being changes as he
moves through life. Man Is an experiencing being.
Let me pause here and differentiate two things that confused Americans when I
say experience. I don't mean consumption. And Americans confuse consumption with
experience. When I go fishing with friends of mine, they go out in a boat and
they're going to fish. And they fish. They've got so much time between two and
five to get this fishing done. They've only got three hours to do it in. They're
supposed to be "recreated" at the end of those three hours so that
they can go back and produce some more. They hold their ''selfs'' constant and
they consume those three hours. They don't want to sit in a boat and not catch
fish, because you can do that at home. That's nothing, it's non-fishing. You're
out to fish, so you want to get the biggest fish. You go fishing.
Incidentally, a lot of American men seem to consume their women in the same way
- the sexes consume each other. So let me differentiate between experience and
consumption: When a man is in situations where change is involved, he is
experiencing and changing. A consuming type of activity, on the other hand, does
not change the person. Thus, if the individual has not changed in some way,
there has been no experience.

I've tried to differentiate these two types of colonialism and how they
contribute to the decay of institutions and to social isolation; how
relationships become more problematical in such a structure; and how people are
deprived of experience and thereby haw change becomes difficult or impossible.
Put this doesn't mean that people do not learn and adapt to the colonial
situation. Let's take social isolation and see what happens in what is called
"economic change." "

I'll take an Indian reservation, partly because I am more familiar with that,
and partly because it's the most complete classic colonial system in the world
that I know about. (I do not mean. to imply that the U.S. has imperialist
designs on American Indian reservations. The present structure of Indian - U.S.
relationships was set up 'in the last century after the period of conscious
exploitation of Indian land in a benevolent attempt to save Indian resources by
making a federal bureau the trustee of Indian lands and directing this same
bureaucracy to guide Indian destiny in an effort to adjust, usually by forced
assimilation practices, Indian communities to their new situation. The modern
result is a complete and socially destructive colonial situation. In fact, most
of the systems I would call hidden colonialism seem to be historical
"accidents" or the results of historical trends. The centralization of
institutional power, institutional decision-making and institutional form in
many large nation-states of the world seems to be the basis for the colonial
relationship of the elite middle-class to working class, rural and regional
groups in those states.

One of the effects of colonialism you find on Indian reservations is an
inadvertent exploitation of natural resources. The U.S. government is in charge
of the resources on an Indian reservation. On those reservations which have
forests there are tribal sawmills which are "tribal" only in the sense
that they are located on the reservation. Put the government bureaucracy
actually runs them. They're supposed to. They are responsible by law and they
have no choice. They aren't being "mean" to the Indians, they're just
supposed to run the sawmill. If they don't run -it efficiently they are liable
to lose their jobs, that's all.

The Indians who tend to have the jobs in the sawmill are the
"responsible" Indians. Now, you can imagine who the responsible
Indians are. They are Indians who are most like the whites and hence the most
"cooperative., (This situation makes for better factionalism on many
reservations, and is another outcome of this classic colonial structure.)
Accordingly, this kind of structure always creates an economic elite of marginal
people, or cooperative marginal people. I don't want to give you the impression
that all marginal people on all Indian reservations or in all countries around
the world are economic elites, they aren't. (Sometimes, if they are marginal
enough, they become revolutionaries) But this is one class of people created by
the classic colonial structure.

When the resources from the timber are sold the returns go into the tribal
treasury. The Indians who have control of these funds, insofar as Indians on an
Indian reservation have control of anything, are these marginal people. Their
job is to mediate between the Indian Bureau and the, Indians, and they are the
same people who work in the sawmill. They have very little power beyond that
which the Bureau of Indian Affairs will give them. The raw materials from this
reservation are, of course, sold outside of the reservation area. The U.S.
Government usually deducts from the sales of these resources the costs of
providing social services to these reservations. (If any of you are familiar
with the head tax system in Africa and Asia, for instance, you can see a very
close resemblance.) The remaining money goes into the tribal treasury and, in
turn, is allocated to further economic activity which is first planned and then
sanctioned by the government as before. What happens after a little while, what
is bound to happen, is that the natural resources of this region are drained
off. So, in a sense, you don't have real economic change there at all, only
exploitation.

What does an Indian experience in this situation? You have to make decisions
in order to experience, and few if any decisions here are taken by Indians.
Let's take another example: industry that moves into an Indian reservation.
The Bureau administrators think that small industry is good for the reservations
because it will create jobs and bring in money. Buildings are, built from tribal
funds to lure in industry. Because of the high transportation costs wages are
not high, 'hut in the minds of the administrators it is better than nothing -
although mazy people refer to these industries as "sweat shops."
Unfortunately, the skills required of workers in many small industries that
move into Indian country seem most easily defined by Indians as female skills.
Many such small industries consciously hire Indian woven for these jobs. In
other places, Indian men avoid working at these kinds of jobs or else start to
work and quit soon afterward so that there is large turn over in an
"undependable" labor force. Thus, Indian men are faced with the
alternatives of being defined as irresponsible "slobs" by the powerful
administrators who are promoting the industry, or as sissies by their own
fellows that's a big choice! You can either go to work at a job that erodes you
self image, while your buddies are out punching cattle - a man's job - or you
can be an irresponsible "slob," not providing for your families again.

And that is what happens in most colonial situations right across the world -
the community lies inert until prodded. That's what happens after a long history
of not having experience, you lie inert until prodded; i.e., nobody at the
bottom or even among the intermediaries act until someone at the top acts in a
way to which you must respond.
And you are judged on how you respond. So it a man from the top or the
intermediary group comes and asks -you whether or not you're going to work in a
fishhook factory and you answer yes., then the rest of the community judges you
on that reaction. They may consider you. a "White man's Indian.," for
instance. And after a certain amount of time people can only respond in terms of
this structure and its movements, because all the institutions, information and
experience is located there.

Let's look at a cattle program. Every once in a while the U.S. decides it
should sponsor an economic-agriculture activity. The government gives money to
the Indians whose job it is to mediate between the government and the people. If
you're on an Indian tribal council, you look to the administrators to tell you
how to set up a program. How else could you do it? You've never seen a cattle
program. You've never run one. You've never taken action very much yourself
except in terms of waiting for the colonial structure to give you cues so you
can act negatively or positively. Now you have to find out how to set up a
cattle program. You set up a cattle program in terms of individual loans, using
a standard American model. The intermediaries run the loan board, again because
they are more like white men by virtue of their association with them - not
because of their experience in making decisions for this community, but just
because of their association with whites inside and outside of the formal
institutional context.

So they set up the loan board and then Sam Blackbird comes in and wants to
get a loan - a big strappin' Sioux Indian about 32, who's worked about two years
since he was fifteen and the rest of the time he's lived with his folks. Well,
you're not going to give money to Sam Blackbird (To the Sioux, a young man
contributes to the People by giving of his courage and his self-confidence. Any
economic contribution he can make is a by-product of the playing out of his
courage and his daring.)

Suppose for some unknown reason Sam Blackbird would get a loan. His kin would
come over and say, "Gee, Sam, how lucky can you get. Them guys up there
finally gave you some money, so let's cut out one of these big steers here and
eat it." Well, what is Sam going to do? He can act like a "greedy
white man," which is how many Indians perceive whites, - not be a Sioux, in
other words or he can help his kin and thus default on his loan. Those are the
options that the structure offers him.

Now, in fact what would happen is that. Sam Blackbird would kill the steer
and default on his loan. So. if you're going to start a cattle program in this
community that isn't the way to do it. But nobody in the community really knows
that, because nobody has ever run a cattle program, and it's been so long since
anybody ever did anything like a cattle program that there are really no
analogies to call on. They would have to experiment around to find out how to
run a cattle program, which they are not able to so. The administrators usually
take active control of a program which is "failing" so that Indians do
not even get to see what finally caused the "failure". (As a social
scientist I could just make a guess, it would only be a guess, that a group of
brothers could be given financial responsibility and that might work. But I
don't know, its been too long since this institution has functioned and
decisions have been in their hands. Africa was never in this bad shape. The
Indian reservation is the most complete system of colonialism I know.)
Let me go back to the first point that I made about these two processes of
change. What I've been talking about is really lack of change because the
structure isolates the people from experience. Let me give you an example of how
that could be different.

The University of Chicago helped the Sac and Fox Indians in Tama, Iowa, start
a small industry.
At first everything seemed chaotic as the Indians grappled with this new
learning experience in their own terms. I remember I went out there one time and
everybody had just walked off their jobs because somebody had said something to
somebody (this is a kinship society, a tribe -in which interpersonal relations
are the most Important thing). But they came back the next day because they
wanted their industry to succeed. All kinds of things changed at Tama - and
really changed.

Before the project an Indian might work in a nearby town and maybe an uncle
would come over one day and say, "Joe, I want to go into town and buy some
birthday gifts for my little niece. Would you take me into town?" Joe has
twenty minutes to get to work, but do you know what he does? He takes his uncle
into town. He shows up the next day and the foreman says, "Where you on
Monday?" And he says, "I had to take my uncle into town." And the
foremen says., "Holy Mackerel,, I've got a production deadline, and you
have to take your uncle to town!'' So he says, "Pick up your check, pal,
you're through." And Joe's reaction is "Well, those white people are
mean, everybody knows that." So he goes home and has to wait another year
before he ventures out to get another job.

Well, one of the things the Sac and Fox found out working in this industry
was that if you went over and asked your nephew to take you into town at the
time when he was supposed to go up and work with the rest of his kinfolk, then
all the other kinfolk might get mad at you for asking him to do that. And that's
the way that they learned about production deadlines. And they learned it.
(Tribal people can be coercive. They are not only friendly, smiling folk people.
That's one side of them. They can also put pressure and social controls on you
like nobody's business.)
Here is another example. One of the Indians was in the process of drawing a
sketch for a tile (the kind you put under hot plates) when his uncle died. He
was supposed to go into a four-day seclusion. it was two months before.
Christmas, with the Christmas rush coming up. Everybody wondered what they could
do: "Charlie has to go into four-day seclusion. We're going, to miss all
the Christmas business." So they went to their own native places' and
discussed the problem and came to a decision. They said, "Why don't we fix
a little place under the door where Charlie is in seclusion so he can make those
designs and slip "em under the door. He doesn't have to touch
anybody." And they worked that, out so that Charlie could keep on working.
Now that's experience and change. That's facing other people in the community
and your environment in terms of your own aspirations and in terms of the kind
of life you're leading.

Let me give you another example. In the early days of the project the Indians
felt they needed to organize their but are tribal people, all relatives, and
nobody likes to tell anybody else what to do. They got together and decided
they're going to nominate someone for chairman because they've heard that's the
way to do that sort of thing. So they nominate Dan, say, who almost crawls under
his chair at the thought of having to "boss" his relatives and their
probable negative reaction. Everybody realized maybe that isn't going to work so
well., and they decide to abandon it. Finally, they decided that the person who
had worked the. most hours, in their co-operative the previous year would
automatically become chairman of the board of the industry. By the nature of the
case, he didn't have to volunteer, the one with the most hours just had the job.
Now, I nor any other social scientist, would ever have thought. of that - never
in a million years! But that is what I mean about experience and change. Under
the colonial system it doesn't happen. It can't. 'Of course, the situation on an
American Indian reservation is extreme, because a large part of the environment
that the American Indian faces are American whites and white society. And they
are pressured to adapt to this environment that they cannot experience.

Let me now return to the two elements of change, decay of institutions and
social isolation. When you have peasant people caught in a colonial situation
and institutions 1ecav, bigger and better intermediaries are. created to meet,
the situation, more marginal men. When an urban person's institutions decay, and
by urban I mean middle class, he is blocked off from coming true. It. gives him
identity problem. Institutions for him are not so much where he makes decisions
about jobs an:.! environment, that's true, too, but he makes decisions about
himself in those institutions. But tribal people - and this is true of a lot of
Africans, Asians, and American Indians - who have their native structure broken
down are in bad shape, because they respond to structure, definitions outside of
themselves. In Beginning God said, "You are the people who plant
corn," or something of that sort. What you are is defined, given. It is
defined in ritual. It is defined in interaction.

You break down the native institutions and social control and definitive cues
as well and tribal people will do whatever is most pleasurable under the
circumstances. If they like to drink, they'll drink themselves right into
oblivion. There are whole American Indian tribes who are just. drinking
themselves into oblivion. This behavior may not be the result of any particular
"psychological trouble unless powerful and prestige outsiders condemn
their behavior. Then there's trouble. Negative attitudes from the outside can be
as potently definitive as cues from a native structure or an administrative
structure. Negative self definitions are the rule rather than the exception
among American Indian groups.
Further, I would hypothesize that this is the Process usually called ''social
disorganization'' by social. scientists. Social scientific literature is replete
with examples of what happens to folk immigrants to large American cities. Every
folk people who have ever come into and American city has gone this phase of
"social disorganization" after they first come to the urban center.
For a folk people who depend on cues of themselves to guide their actions,
immigration and loss of the social structure can be personally demoralizing;
thus the rise of' crime, etc.
However, immigrants to large American cities have traditionally been able to
organize a new institutional structure after this initial period of social break
down. By the use of this new institutional structure they were able to learn
about the American environment, inl with this new knowledge and the social power
their institutions gave them they 'were able to make a place for themselves on
the American scene.

Such is not the case in the modern milieu. Recent immigrants are caught in a
hidden colonial situation as the American system has centralized. Their only
structure is the structure of powerlessness and the resultant lack of experience
and negative self definitions that are part of the system itself.
Like many American Indian groups they find it impossible to experience and
cope with their now environment, can build no new institutions, and are faced
with a definition of themselves as incompetent and no way to counter, in action,
these definitions. Their only option is to throw that definition back into the
face of the middle class and say "To hell with you" by riots, Black
Power movements and the like.

Cherokee Colonial Nation

Not only is the Inner City caught in a hidden colonial structure, but
regional groups like Appalachia are fast approaching the Inner City in terms of
the completeness of the colonial situation. A consciousness,, at least in
America, of groups caught in a similar colonial relationship is growing; and the
Poor March, a coalition of Negroes, Appalachians, Mexican-Americans and American
Indians is evidence of this consciousness.

Classic colonialism, except in the case of American Indians, is a fast
disappearing social phenomenon, but hidden colonialism as a type of
contact seems to be increasing in the world. Faster, perhaps in the U.S. because
this country is the most advanced in the technologically sense, but a world wide
phenomenon nevertheless.

Further, one could, by stretching this type of analysis, look at student
unrest in this theoretical framework. Certainly, this generation of students
have had a radically different social experience than the rest of the societies
of which they are a part. And if they are not a historic, separate community
they, at least, feel themselves to have a different and special outlook and
culture. They have a generational cohesion and sense of community as well. Their
lives are administered by people they feel a separateness from. They are
powerless and feel they cannot accept a definition of themselves as transitory
and temporary. But unlike the modern folk people who are caught in a hidden
colonial situation they, by virtue of their socialization in middle class
families, understand their total environment much better and many seem to reject
it.

I hope I do not seem so pretentious as to be trying to explain the whole
world through one simple theoretical framework, or such a bad scientist that I
am "cramming" selective data into a simple explanation and ignoring
all other data. However, it does seem that there is a commonality of human
response where one is powerless and at the same time pressured to adjust to
outside demands in a situation not of one's own makings, where one is unable or
unwilling to concede to the demands so that the only possible reaction is to
take over a negative self definition or reject the demands out of hand,